Many of us may have been introduced to a new company only to find that we don’t understand the language of its people; or of our new job… due to the many acronyms! And interestingly, long-standing employees often are not exactly sure what those acronyms mean….

Others, me included, find ourselves at times a little lost when faced with the evolving language of text and tech, in which case the acronym finder (which claims to be the world’s largest and most comprehensive dictionary of abbreviations and acronyms) can be handy.

Here are some current rules of the road.

Abbreviations that are formed by using the first initials of separate words should not have any full stops after the letters: OPQ, US, UK, PJM

Acronym: this is a word, like radar or UNICEF, not a set of initials, like the ABC or FBI.

Write out years not yrs, even if part of a quote.

Make an acronym or abbreviation plural by adding an s (no apostrophe), for example OPQs, WSQs.

Spell out any unfamiliar abbreviations and acronyms at first mention, with the abbreviation immediately following in brackets, for example: Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ). When mentioning again later in the same document, use the abbreviation only.

Nomenclature

In 1943, David Davis of Bell Laboratories coined the term acronym as the name for a word created from the first letters of each word in a series of words (such as sonar, created from sound navigation and ranging).

Although the term acronym is widely used to describe any abbreviation formed from initial letters, most dictionaries define acronym to mean “a word” in its original sense, while some include a secondary indication of usage, attributing to acronym the same meaning as that of initialism. According to the primary definition found in most dictionaries, acronyms examples include, NATO, scuba , and radar, while examples of initialisms would include FBI and HTML.

There is no agreement on what to call abbreviations whose pronunciation involves the combination of letter names and words, such as JPEG and MS-DOS.

The term for the word-by-word reconstruction of an acronym or initialism is an expansion.

It has come to our attention from several emergency rooms that many EMS narratives have taken a decidedly creative direction lately. Effective immediately, all members are to refrain from using slang and abbreviations to describe patients, such as the following:

1) Cardiac patients should not be referred to as suffering from MUH (messed up heart), PBS (pretty bad shape), PCL (pre-code looking) or HIBGIA (had it before, got it again).

2) Stroke patients are NOT “Charlie Carrots.”

Nor are rescuers to use CCFCCP(Coo Coo for Cocoa Puffs) to describe their mental state.